Video: Enhanced Campaigns Targeting and Bidding Challenges

In our last video on Enhanced Campaigns we briefly covered why they were inevitable and ultimately a good thing. They do present some challenges though and here we want to discuss those challenges, particularly targeting and bidding.

George Michie: Hi. I’m George Michie. I want to talk today about Enhanced Campaigns and some of the challenges we face with this.

In my last video I talked a little bit about why Enhanced Campaigns were sort of inevitable and why we’re excited about them. There are some challenges though, and I want to be upfront with them.

We have, from Google, the ability to target through Enhanced Campaigns for features like proximity to a store which are really exciting, but currently Google isn’t passing us the data to tell us how close a given user was to one of our physical locations. What that means is we can’t actually see whether there is a performance difference for folks who are closer to a brick and mortar versus farther away.

So we have the ability to set different bids based on proximity, we just don’t currently have the ability to actually see whether it matters or not, or whether it matters as a function of device or time of day, or whatever. So we think that is a challenge.

We have had conversations with Google about it to say, ‘We need this.’ They get that. They’re concerned about privacy issues and whether they can share a time stamp of when this person was at exactly what location. Understandable, but we’d like to get that information if we can.

The second big challenge that I think is out there is what we refer to as the problem of stacking. Right now the modifiers you place on your bids have to stack on top of each other. So if you say, for example, we know that the conversion rate on smart phones is one fifth of that on laptops or tablets, we’re going to have, generally speaking, a modifier that says if this is a smart phone, only bid 20% of what you would normally bid.

But let’s say within a mile of my store, so this proximity notion, we want to bid a reasonable amount for the smart devices because the person might be on foot and might walk into one of our stores. So let’s say your base bid for a given ad is $1 and your mobile bid then is 20 cents, and you say, ‘Well, if it’s within a mile of my store I want to bid $1. Okay. So you have to then have a proximity bid that says multiply whatever bid that you have by 5.

So let’s look at what that does to our laptop bid. All of a sudden we’ve gone, in that proximity, from a $1 bid to a $5 bid. That may make sense. That may be crazy. We don’t know because we haven’t seen the data.

But the problem is, if it turns out to be crazy, we still have to stack those bid modifiers on top of each other. There’s no way to create conditional logic that says, ‘I only want to bid a fifth for mobile devices if it’s more than this far away.’

And so Google is aware of that challenge also. We think there are a number of ways to address it, but the fix may be a long time down the road. So more on what excites us about Enhanced Campaigns coming up in another video. Thanks.